Cargo of Orchids (16 page)

Junius mopped his brow with a oily handkerchief and asked Consuelo if she might happen to be driving all the way to Lafayette, which he pronounced “Laughyet,” where he was going to hunt for a job on the gut bucket. I translated for him. Consuelo told me to ask him how much further it was to Lafayette, and he said that all depended on how long they took to get there. Consuelo wanted to know if we would arrive before dark, and Junius said maybe yes, maybe no, depended on if she kept driving the way old people made love. I told her what he’d said, and immediately regretted it; Consuelo drew her .38 out of her waistband and asked him if he thought he’d get there faster if he got out and walked. She pointed her gun at Junius’s feet; no translation was necessary. Junius started lifting his feet one at a time, as if dancing. His tongue lodged itself permanently between the gap in his teeth.

I told him Consuelo wasn’t going to hurt him as long as he co-operated. Consuelo cursed. Junius, who seemed to have become more shadow than flesh, began to moan and rock back and forth in his seat. His face had ballooned with fear, and his jaw was working overtime; he seemed to be chewing air and swallowing it. He had spit coming out at the corners of his mouth. I half shut my eyes against the glare from the road, wishing the world could be another kind of place.

Then—I couldn’t help it—I told Consuelo to leave the man alone. It was the wrong thing to say; I had once again showed contempt for her ways. I could see it in her eyes, the triumph of one who has gained dangerous power over another.

The air inside the cab felt dense and wet. Consuelo drove, avoiding potholes, avoiding conversation, still holding her .38, which rested on the steering wheel. I kept my eyes on her hands as she drove, trying to read my future. I already knew what was going to happen to Junius.

She took everything he had, except his undershorts, and left him, the sun teetering over the tips of the pines, at the edge of a wood bordering a sandy red track that cut through an endless pecan field.

“Don’t think he wouldn’t have robbed
us
if we’d given him half a chance,” she said.

The sky to the south trembled with dry lightning. Consuelo pulled into the oyster-shell parking lot of the first motel with a Vacancy sign and parked between two rain barrels full of empty Jax bottles. When she opened my door, the truck filled with the smell of creosote and burnt diesel fuel from the railway tracks across the road, where a Southern Pacific freight car was on fire. The fire seemed to draw the night sky down around it, enveloping two men with flashlights who stood a short distance from the wreck, trying to contain the flames.

When I translated for Consuelo what the motel manager had said, that the nearest accommodation was a mile up the road, that he wasn’t looking for more business tonight, Consuelo told me to ask him to reconsider. She left a hundred-dollar bill on the counter, then went to get a Coke from the machine. The manager, who smelled of nicotine and a franchise chicken dinner, said the Coke machine was on the blink and the ice machine was
broken too. As far as he was concerned, he said, ice was for Eskimos.

“You girls travelling alone?” he asked me, toying with his moustache.

“Help me,” I tried to whisper. “Help me get away from her. Call the police.”

He looked at me sideways, lit a cigarette and sucked the smoke in through teeth that were stained as yellow as his moustache.

I pushed the smoke away with my hand, and tried to communicate, by using sign language, that I was desperate. He nodded his head, trying to appease me, as if to say he would agree with anything just to keep me happy until the men in white jackets arrived. He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray filled with nail clippings, then covered the ashtray with a wad of invoices stamped Overdue.

“She got some kind of problem?” he asked Consuelo when she came back to the counter. He nodded towards me, then looked at Consuelo and raised his eyebrows. “I don’t need any trouble here,” he said. “I have to call the police, it will only bring more.”

Consuelo narrowed her eyes at him, and then at me. If she didn’t understand the words he spoke, she must have understood my intentions. Behind him, on the wall, I could see rows of room keys hanging on hooks. I thought of what had happened to the last man who hadn’t surrendered his key. The manager stared at us, not moving, but Consuelo had a way without words. He shook his head, then tossed her the key to Room 0.

“Leave it in the room when you check out,” he said. “I don’t do mornings.”

The night air felt cooler when we went back outside, and a light rain washed over me as I lifted my face, exhaling the unpleasant fumes of the day—the stale air, cigarette smoke and chicken grease. As we crossed the parking lot, through glazed pools of yellow light from the street lamps, the blue neon Vacancy under the Pair-A-Dice Motel sign, I sensed a new loneliness taking shape around me, and I wanted to run out onto the highway leading down into darkness in both directions and wait for the ride that would take me away from myself.

Then the lights went off inside, and the word Sorry replaced the neon Vacancy. Consuelo pushed me across the shell parking lot into the blackness.

Consuelo tied me to the bed, saying that if I was going to behave like a
loca
, she would start treating me like one. I said I was her hostage, that I would be crazy if I
didn’t
try to get away. She reminded me again that the only reason she wasn’t going to hurt me was because of the baby. I said she had hurt me enough, keeping me tied up, giving me food I wouldn’t have fed a dog. She replied that I had much to learn, and left me lying there on my back while she sat flicking through the channels on the television. I caught snippets from a world I felt further away from than ever before: “… more people are alive today than have died in all of …”; “… over and touch your toes, now count …”; “Before me, she was vegetarian …”; “In seahorses, it is the male who gives …” and “1,250 prisoners
on death row have gone on a hunger strike …” She didn’t switch right away from the Spanish-speaking news channel, and I heard that a woman from Tranquilandia had been arrested for smuggling, that customs officers, “aroused by the unusual shape of her buttocks,” had conducted a search revealing two eight-inch-long incisions in her buttocks stuffed with bags of cocaine. The newscaster called the incident, in English, a “bust bummer.” Consuelo asked me what this meant, and when I didn’t reply she turned off the television.

In the middle of the night, I was awakened by the sound of gunfire and glass breaking. The room was bright, lit by a full moon that had bullied its way through the clouds. The sound of guns going off had become so familiar to me that I almost rolled over and went back to my dream. I had followed a glass bird into a forest, where it fed on small white seeds of moonlight as I watched: inside the bird a transparent egg, and inside the egg an unborn bird whose cut-crystal wings were splinters of glass. Consuelo, as she stood before the window, blending with the moonlight, looked like the bird I had followed deeper and deeper into the night, and now I couldn’t remember my way back. I lay on the bed, lost, trying to remember where I belonged, as she peered out at the sultry darkness, the dirty lace curtains enveloping her.

There was a breeze smelling faintly of ozone, dust from the shell parking lot, and gun-metal. I could hear a motor running. Consuelo backed away from the window and stood beside my bed, motioning for me to keep quiet. I heard a man shouting, “Sireena, SI-REEEN-A! If you won’t
fuck me, FUCK YOU!” and a car door slamming shut. I heard the squeal of tires across crushed beer cans and oyster shells, and then peace again, except for the sound of my own heart beating. I lay back, waiting for the black heavens to close around the moon and leave me in darkness. I lay that way for the rest of the night, brooding, like a small idea in a disturbed mind.

Consuelo untied my hands as soon as we had daylight, but kept a grip on my arm as she steered me towards the truck. Neither of us spoke as she headed south down the highway.

I thought of the woman called Sireena, waking in a room with a broken window and no way out. Sireena with her hotbox heart, splashing cold water on her face, bringing the swelling down. The crackling radio playing inside her head,
Sireena, Sireena, why can’t you be true?
Sireena wearing dark glasses in the sanctuary of the shower, singing off-key and aching.

By now the sun was threatening to rise, bleeding rusty streaks across the sky, and I could make out the silhouettes of clapboard beer joints, brick warehouses and tumbledown paintless houses built along railway spurs, as if they might suddenly decide to pack it in and hop a freight train out of there.

We drove through the morning, heading towards the coast, past distant islands of sawgrass, dead bald cypress trees twisted like peppermint sticks, fishing shacks built up on stilts above flooded woods, pirogues tied to cabin pilings, herons lifting on extended wings to the strains of “La Jolie Blonde” on the truck radio.

At noon, Consuelo pulled in to a ramshackle restaurant called Ida’s Home Cooking and Live Bait Shop. She took the keys and tied my hands to the wheel, but halfway to the door of the restaurant she changed her mind. I could come in with her, she said, as long as I didn’t open my mouth except to eat.

A harried Ida, wearing a white T-shirt with “Live Bait” across her chest and flamingo-pink stretch pants, pointed us to take any one of the unoccupied driftwood tables, held together by rusty spikes and littered with crab shells. I couldn’t tell if the shells were part of the decor or if Ida hadn’t got round to cleaning them up. We ate boiled shrimp and blue-point crab with
sauce piquante
, and piled our shells on top of the others. Consuelo ordered iced tea, which came in tall blue glasses with cracked ice and mint leaves. I watched her pop a sprig of mint into her mouth, chew it, then swallow.

Consuelo wanted to know what
live bait
meant. I said it meant Ida was in the hostage-taking business too.

Early that evening, we drew up outside the gates to an above-ground cemetery on the outskirts of a small town called Jean Batista. Consuelo let me out of the truck but told me to stay by the gates while she went across the road to make a phone call. I had a chance to read the glassed-in directory map of the cemetery, which showed where the town’s VIPs were buried, including the smuggler and privateer after whom the town had been named.

When Consuelo had made her call, we walked up Jesus Steet to Business. The graveyard, which turned out to be a
perfect replica of the town its residents had relocated from, had streets and avenues, some of them tree-lined, others littered with garbage. Most of the more well-to-do dead were housed in miniature replicas of the plantations or white-pillared mansions they’d left behind. The less well off had been crowded into six-storey blocks of coffin-sized apartments.

Planters full of Holy Ghost orchids surrounded the Cattle family’s real estate. “Here Lies Major Desiard Cattle, Erected by His Wife,” I read when we stopped in front of the major’s resting place. I was trying to explain to Consuelo why this was amusing, when she pointed to a plot I hadn’t noticed, a simple stone with the name Tiny Cattle inscribed on it, his birth date, then a dash and the year he had died. “He should be here soon,” she said, and sure enough, shortly afterwards, Tiny Cattle arrived, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat without a crown; his long white hair, tied in a top knot, spilled out over the hat’s rim. His face was a translucent white; he wore dark glasses and an AA medallion around his neck. His once-white shirt was half tucked into his wrinkled khaki trousers. One of the largest men I’d ever seen, he was also barefooted.

He wiped his sweaty palms on the sides of his trousers before shaking hands with Consuelo. He didn’t look at me; I suspected she had told him that where I was concerned, he was to mind his own business. He kept looking at the sky instead, as if he expected someone else to join us.

When Consuelo asked him about the headstone, Tiny looked embarrassed and said there’d been a sale on tombstones
and a bunch of his buddies got together and bought one for him, thinking he was going to drink himself to death that year. “I fooled everyone,” he said. Though he admitted he was looking forward to joining the rest of the family, “the most executed family in Luzianne,” starting with his great-grandad, Desiard Cattle, who grew loonified in his twilight years, robbed the Merchants and Farmers Bank in Nakitish with a pair of pearl-handled duelling pistols and got hanged for crimes against property.

“I’m the last—and the worst—of my line,” Tiny said; he spoke Spanish with a distinct southern accent. “My old man’s over there; cops shot him. I buried him with his pager and a roll of quarters. So’s he can keep in touch.”

Consuelo, I could tell, was not interested in Tiny’s geneology. “When can you get us out of here?” she asked.

Tiny wiped his brow and adjusted his hat. “You’re free, white and twenty-one. You can walk right out of here any old time.”

Consuelo shot him the look. Tiny checked himself. “No problemo. I can get you out tomorrow night. Where you all headed?”

“Tranquilandia,” said Consuelo.

Tiny scratched at his face, pulled his ear, then began twisting his medallion as he pulled a flask from his hip pocket and took a drink. He said he could think of only one good thing to say about Tranquilandia, and that was that no one on the island owed him any money. “Last time I flew down, I got shot at,” he said. “The only law they got in that place is the law of gravity, and even that don’t work most of the time …”

Consuelo waited until his words trailed off. “Tonight. Can you get us out of here this evening?”

She walked Tiny back to the road where our trucks were parked.
“Mañana, por la tarde,”
he said. “Tomorrow evening, soon’s it’s dark.”

A bumper sticker on Tiny Cattle’s truck said “Easy Does It, Jesus.” He raised the flask to his lips and had another swig. Consuelo took the flask, sniffed it and made a face.

“Come and pick us up in the morning. Nine o’clock. We will wait for you. Don’t be late.”